Wednesday, August 29, 2012

I recently returned from a visit to Kalangala on Bugula Island, the largest of the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria, where I witnessed the
negative social and environmental effects of oil palm production. The oil palm is a tree that produces a
cluster of fruit that can be pressed to produce oil used for cooking. Some years ago the Ugandan government entered
into an agreement with BIDCO oil refineries to develop oil palm plantations on
the island as well as other locations in Uganda. After talking to individuals
on the island, I have come to understand that the Ugandan government
transferred large tracts it controlled to BIDCO as an economic development
measure sweetening the deal by giving the company a fifteen year tax break.

In Indonesia oil palm monoculture has been criticized by
environmental groups because of the destruction of the native forests threatening
the endangered orangutan. Something
similar is happening in Kalangala with one third of the island now covered with
oil palm plantations. Great tracks of
native forests have been destroyed threatening the traditional way of life of
islanders who used the forests for wood for cooking, housing and boat building.
Charges of “land grabbing” have also been made as islanders have lost land that
was used for generations. Moreover, the
use of fertilizer and herbicides on the oil palm plantations results in runoff
to neighboring land as well as into Lake Victoria.

Finally, while on the island, I had a chance to meet and
talk with some of the workers who spray herbicides to control vegetation and
trees that would overwhelm the oil palms.
These young workers, recruited from around Uganda with promises of good
jobs, told me:

They earn 3000 shillings per day, about $1.20.

They are expected to work every day with no time off.

They work without protective clothing with only boots and
paper dust masks.

They live crowded together in company housing sleeping on
the floor without mattresses, packed together like sardines.

Because food provided by the company and sundries from
the company store are deducted, their net pay is between zero and 40,000
shillings per month, the latter being $16.00 in US currency.

Interviewing oil palm workers who spray herbicides to control vegetation.

The first graph shows job loss during the recession and now during the slow recovery. Net job loss for people with bachelors degrees or better was small during the recession and the recovery has added some two million jobs in this category. Associate degree or some college lost jobs during the recession but have gained all back in the last two years. However, high school or less jobs were reduced by 5.6 Million without any growth in the recovery.

Next let's at change in employment over a longer period of time from Jan 1989 to February 2012. Job growth among the most educated is strong, that of those with some college comes next and those with a high school education or less show a net loss of jobs.

So the graphs show that the benefit of a college education continued during the Great Recession and difficult recovery that we are now in. So the reason for soaring college enrollment is clear - the opportunity for a good job in this time of high unemployment.

Cell phone usage is common here as one can tell on every Kampala street and country lane. This is confirmed by the recent survey by the Uganda National Bureau of
Statistics mentioned in the post below and reported in the Daily Monitor. The survey found household cell phone usage
at 87% for urban Ugandans and 53% of those living in rural areas. These numbers are eye-popping when contrasted
with electricity use which is 53% among urban households, just 5% among rural
ones. And note that the great majority of people in Uganda - 80% - live in the countryside.

My cell phone that I use in Uganda purchased new for $30.00. It is not a smart phone but it handles texts and has an alarm. Very reliable and handy.

"Send money across all (phone) networks" this booth says.

In this developing country, cell phones have come to play
an important role and not just for making calls. The country, I was surprised to learn, uses
cell phones in novel ways. For example,
individuals area able and frequently do send money via cell phones. Here is how it works. The cell phone companies have small offices
virtually everywhere. At one of these
offices an individual deposits the money to be transferred along with a small
fee. A message is sent to the cell phone of the person who is receiving the
funds who then goes to her nearest cell phone office to collect the cash. Since Uganda operates as a cash economy
without bank checks and credit cards, transferring money this way fills an important
role. Moreover, cell phones are now
being used a Ugandan to pay bills for electricity, phones and other services. So the cell phone companies are beginning to
act like banks allowing individuals to transfer money and pay bills.

Sign advertising "pay your electric bill" by phone.

There is something else about the way cell phones work
here that is quite different from the U.S. First, one buys a cell phone and then
buys airtime. This is done primarily
through cards that cost from 1000 Uganda Shillings (25 cents) to 10,000
Shillings ($2.50) or more. One loads this airtime by entering a coded numbers
on the card into the phone. Because the
cell phone companies have small entrepreneurs selling cards virtually everywhere,
these cards are easy to find.

Economic development happens in an organic and mostly
unplanned way. In Uganda and other
developing countries, the wired infra-structure for phones has been largely
skipped as the country has moved rapidly to cell phones avoiding LAN
lines. I was surprised how Uganda has
adopted telecommunications technology.
Their creativity is something to admire.

Friday, August 24, 2012

Street scene downtown Kampala. The booth in the center allows people to send money to others using cell phones.

A new study shows an increasing gap in poverty between
rural and urban Ugandans according to the country’s leading newspaper, the
Monitor.

According to the report, 20% of urban Ugandans while only 2%
do in rural areas; 4% of those living in the city have a car while less than 1%
of those living in rural areas do; the numbers for bicycles are reversed: 20% of households in urban areas own a
bicycle, 41% of rural households. These
figures must also be considered in context as over 80% of Ugandans live in the
countryside but the cities are growing quickly because of the perceived opportunity
there.

Rural women near Kitchwamba, Bushenyi District, western Uganda

The report underscores the inequality of wealth in Uganda, a
country with a very uneven distribution of family income. According to the World Bank, Uganda’s GINI
Index, a measure of income inequality was 44 in 2009 rivaling that of the
United States. (The higher the Gini
Index, the more inequality). To get a sense of what this means, the poorest 10%
of Ugandans had received just 2.3% of all income while the top 10% received
over 36% of all income.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
estimates the U.S. Gini Index to be 49 in 2009, the highest among all developed
countries worldwide. Again, a look at
who gets what is instructive: in the U.S.: the top 10% of earners have an average $87,257
after taxes while those in the bottom 10% have incomes of $5,819 according to
an October 21, 2008 report of the respected British magazine the Economist.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

NAPE Offices in Kampala, Uganda. The organization also has various grassroots projects throughout the country.

National Association of Professional
Environmentalists (Uganda) where I am volunteering has the mission of “lobbying
and advocating for the sustainable management of natural resources for the
benefit of all (Ugandans).” The
organization referred to by its initials NAPE – pronounced nahpay – has worked heroically
for 15 years to improve the quality of drinking water, preserve forests,
represent communities displaced by large dams, fight climate change, and
protect major lakes and lands from degradation from oil exploration.

NAPE staff are smart, committed and realistic. As they explain, “We monitor government
actions, conduct research, provide educational materials, develop science-based
strategies, organize affected communities, make common cause with other civil
society organisations and international organisations, and engage government
officials at all levels. It is an ambitious undertaking, but as lifelong
Ugandans we cannot ignore what is happening to our precious homeland. While we
stand ready to work with anyone committed to the public interest, we also will
not allow powerful political or special interests to intimidate or silence us.
We have done so since our founding in 1997.”

In future postings I’ll explore some of the specific
projects that NAPE is now engaged.

Dear Readers, astute person who sent me a response noted, the picture referred to in question 13 of the posting below of July 12, TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE ABOUT UGANDA, is actually a termite hill, not an ant hill. My apologies and for those of you who answered termite hill, please add one to your score.
Sincerely,
Ira

Monday, August 6, 2012

Mpanga Forest in
Mpigi, about 45 KM (25 miles) southwest of Kampala, Uganda. Mpanga Forest is an approximately 450 hectare
(1100 acre) preserve that hosts many species of butterflies, birds and monkeys.
But most impressive are the trees, tall, stately, creating a rain forest canopy
high above the ground.

A large fig tree in Mpanga Forest with the Author for comparison.

Unfortunately, we saw few tracts of forest on our way to
Mpanga, not surprising given the rate of deforestation in Africa. According to Wikipedia, Africa is suffering deforestation at twice the world rate,
according to the United Nations Environment Programme: Of
course, Africa is not alone this is a worldwide trend and problem, one that
worsens global warming by eliminating trees that soak up carbon dioxide. Again, citing Wikipedia, “About half of the world
original forests had disappeared by 2011, the majority during the last 50
years. "Since 1990 half of the rain forests have disappeared.”

Thinking
about the loss of forests as we hiked through Mpanga Forest, the lyrics from
Big Yellow Taxi by Joanie Mitchell came back to me:

They took all the
treesAnd put them in a tree museumThen they charged the peopleA dollar and a half just to see 'emDon't it always seem to go,That you don't know what you've got'Til it's goneThey paved paradiseAnd put up a parking lot

Friday, August 3, 2012

While
English is the official language, Ugandans as small children first learn to
speak one of more than forty native tongues that fall into four families: Bantu,
Nilotic, Central Sudanic, Kuliak. Among the four, more people speak
a variety of Bantu and the Luganda language is the largest within the Bantu group.
Moreover, Luganda is the dominant language
in central Uganda where Kampala, the capital is located and where I am
stationed as a volunteer.

Although educated people speak English, Luganda is
the language one hears on the streets, in taxis, in restaurants - that the ordinary speech of people. Here television station
programs are in either English or Luganda and there is a healthy English and
Luganda press.

All that I might ever want to know about Luganda, and then some.

So, upon arriving I decided to try to learn
Luganda, at least enough to order dinner, ask directions and shop. This has been a more difficult task than I
thought as both the vocabulary and word structure are quite different than
English and European languages. For
example, there are at least eight noun classes in Luganda, each with its own rules
for forming plurals and adjectival agreement.
Furthermore, while in English we tend to add suffixes such as making the
plural or regular nouns when we add s, in Luganda one adds at the front of the
noun to make plurals and for other reasons.

A good example of all this is from class one
nouns which designate people (although not all people are in class one). Using the root for person, ntu, one creates
the singular by adding omu getting omuntu, person; using the plural prefix, aba,
one gets abantu, people. Similarly the
root for girl is wala yielding omuwala, girl, and abawala, girls. According to my teacher, other noun classes
use different prefixes, making my head spin.

There are many other complications that make
learning Luganda difficult but not impossible. But the little I have mastered has gotten a smile
from some locals and respect on a bus ride recently when I was able to state
where I was going and ask the bus to stop when I arrived.